A few thousand miles away in Asia website HKEPC is reporting two interesting snippets, both regarding Intel. Rocket Lake-S processors would be available on March 15th according to the website.

HKEPC posted this what I tag to be a rumor, for now, they report that Intel's 11th generation Rocket Lake-S CPU is available on March 15. Both also state that IPC performance has increased significantly.

The second news item is more in line with earlier rumors though, the 2nd generation Core processors based on Alder Lake, with up to 16 cores configured as BIG.little is expected to be announced in September and available in December. Here IPC would again be increased by 20%.

It is assumed that the new 12th-generation Alder Lake-S CPU will use an enhanced version of the 10nm ESF fabrication process, which reduces power consumption by 15% compared to the existing 10nm SuperFin. Add to that the big.LITTLE hybrid CPU architecture with energy-friendly and performance processor cores. The biggest cores will use the new Golden Cove architecture, the small cores are based on Atom's Gracemont cores, 8 large and 8 small would account for up to 16 cores. The big ones can be hyper-threaded, so that makes 24 threads in total.

The performance of Alder Lake's BIG cores (Golden Cove) is claimed to see a 20% IPC performance improvement compared to Tiger Lake's Willow Cove core, and the small core Gracemont is about the same as Skylake performance. The overall IPC performance is 16~18% longer.

Intel Rocket Lake-S Processors allegedly available March 15th (+ Alder Lake news)